A follow-up to this blog post.
The Lagos State Government, one of the best performers in the federal republic when it comes to Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), does not expect to meets its IGR target for the 2009 budget year (an effect of the difficult economic times), and will borrow to finance projects for the current budget year.
The references blog post is one of many I have made touting the benefits of geographic consolidation at the second and third tiers of our governance. Such restructuring is appropriate for the current economic times, and was appropriate for every year of the last 50 years of our boom-and-bust economy. A 6-state federal republic at 1960, rather than a 3-region federation, could have avoided some (alas not all) of the political issues that bedevilled the First Republic. The fiscal efficiency and elimination of waste are useful in lean times, but are even more beneficial in times of plenty (every Naira wasted on inefficient, wasteful governance is one less Naira for economic infrastructure, education/research, health/welfare, security/defence, etc).
What we today call "Lagos State" should actually be a third-tier governance unit, part of a second-tier state that would be coterminous with what is currently known euphemistically as the Southwest. It should be the "local" government, where the state (i.e. "Southwest") handles regional issues and the federal government deals with issues affecting the entire federal republic, its international trade and diplomacy. Indeed, the Lagos State government as exists today is already the "local" government, directly governing the entire state, effecting turning the local government areas into meaningless constitutional abstractions that suck up money while doing little to justify their existence. In Lagos, and in the rest of the 36 states, the local government areas are mere "departments" of the state governor's office, no more than rubber-stamp puppets to the will of the imperial governorate.
And Lagos is also an example of why geographical consolidation has not happened, despite the obvious fiscal benefits. In lean times (like now), Lagos should want to use its fiscal resources as efficiently as possible, and in times of plenty, Lagos should want to use any windfalls to upgrade the insufficient infrastructure of the mega-city. Yet the signature political quarrel between the Federal Government and the Lagos State government centres around the Lagos governorate's long-running agitation to INCREASE the number of (pointless) local government areas in Lagos State from 20 to 37.
The push for an 85% increase in the number of Lagos-area LGAs began during the reign of ex-Governor Bola Tinubu, the predecessor, mentor and godfather of current Governor Babatunde Fashola, and it continues on today. The federal government's position is such a change would require a constitutional amendment, while the Lagos government counters the federal position is unconstitutional because it federalizes what is or should be a purely state matter. Do not for a second mistake the federal government's position as being in support of geographic consolidation; without going into detail (if you are not Nigerian, you probably won't understand), there is a lot of politics and quite a bit of oil-revenue-distribution fiscal issues linked to the question of how many LGAs a state has (and to the number of states a "geo-political zone" has).
It is depressing that instead of a strong national push, driven by citizens, towards geographic consolidation, we have continuing agitation for "more states" and "more LGAs". And from a rational and logical point of view, I do not understand why a state that does not bring in enough revenue (from internal and federal sources) to meet its budget would be trying to increase its expenses by creating meaningless new LGAs. Each of these LGAS would come complete with a chairman, "supervisory councillors, and "regular councillors" not to mention an expanding concentric web of "legal" and "constitutional" expenses centred on the existence of an LGA and its government that add nothing productive to the polity, economy or society, but nevertheless suck up resources that could be used more effectively and efficiently elsewhere.
Lets be honest.
Bola Tinubu has a giant political machine to support, one of the biggest single-person-controlled juggernauts on the Nigerian political landscape. To maintain his army, Tinubu must deploy finance, provisions, patronage, largesse. There is only so much you can do by controlling the award of mega-bucks contracts, you need more than that. So why not create new LGAs? It is not like you are giving your key lieutenants any power (LGAs have none), just a nice title, a nice office, and the illusion of being important; all that, without the moral, personal and legal quandary of directly stealing public funds to directly hand over to your associates. As a bonus, you get to distribute brand new civil service jobs (albeit superfluous ones) to a grateful electorate; for 50 years now Nigerian leaders (and citizens too, sadly) when given a choice have repeatedly chosen these kind of budget-draining-but-popularity-boosting measures over the more-difficult-yet-more-rewarding long-term investments that would make Nigeria wealthy enough to support all of its citizens. Inevitably there is always a budget crisis, and the governments either "retrench" thousands of workers, keep the workers on the payroll but fail to pay them, or (as Lagos State is doing now) borrow prodigious sums from local and international banks to keep the fiscal taps running (while running up the debt, interest payments, and raising the proportion of the budget that must be committed to interest payment which effectively lowers the proportion that can be spent on other things, thus forcing more borrowing as there isn't enough to finance non-interest-related spending -- not that there was enough to begin with).
It is hard to know for sure, since we don't have real elections (or issue-driven debate about vital questions), but I believe a majority of Nigerians are broadly supportive of consolidating the number of states from 36 to 6. And I believe the same majority would support reducing the number of LGAs from 774 to 72 (with no correlation assumed between the 36 states and the 72 new districts (12 districts to each of 6 new states).
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